Noonday

SIX

All the normal routines of the house had broken down, though food — mainly cold meats and salad — still appeared at mealtimes, laid out on the sideboard in the dining room. Elinor and Rachel ate — when they ate at all — in their mother’s room. Paul, newly arrived from London, sat in solitary splendor at the dining-room table or, more often, took bread and cheese wrapped in a napkin and went out to sketch on the marshes. He’d responded to Elinor’s plea for help; though, in fact, there was very little he could do, apart from just be there when she needed to talk. The only practical, useful thing he could do was spend time with Kenny, who seemed, for some extraordinary reason, to have become quite attached to him.

Returning late one afternoon from a sketching trip, he found Kenny loitering at the end of the drive. He’d been hoping for a visit from his mother, though nobody seemed to know whether he had any reason to expect one.

“Wishful thinking, I’m afraid,” Rachel said. “I’ve no patience with the woman. I mean, I know she’s probably having a hard time but then, frankly, so are we.”

Paul found the sight of the boy mooching about at the end of the drive almost intolerable. The last bus had been and gone; she wouldn’t be coming now — if she’d had any intention of coming at all. Kenny sometimes invented these visits because he wanted them so badly, though there had been times when she’d arranged to come and then just not shown up. “You all right, Kenny?” Paul asked, turning into the drive. He got a sort of smile in return, though he thought from the boy’s swollen eyelids that he might have been crying. Bloody woman. He went into the house and poured himself a drink — Tim was still in London — but he couldn’t settle so, in the end, he fetched a football from Kenny’s room and they spent an hour in the lane behind the house kicking the ball around, using old coats he found in the under-stairs cupboard as goalposts. The sun sank lower in the sky, its blood-red smears widening to a flood, and still they played. Paul’s shadow lengthened till it threatened to envelop Kenny, while, at the same time, the boy’s shadow fled away.

They played until Paul was too tired to go on. “Come on, let’s go and get something to eat.” Kenny dragged his feet, complaining all the way, but then burst into the hall, eyes glowing, pupils dilated, looking like a little fox cub, with his thin, sharp face and orange hair. He even smelled strong and musky like a wild animal. Paul cut them each a slice of veal and ham pie and settled down to eat. Soon Kenny was yawning uncontrollably, tired out by the misery of his long wait as much as by the football; but at least he’d sleep. Ought to, anyway.

After Kenny had gone upstairs to bed, Paul got his sketchbook out and looked through the drawings he’d done that day, but after a while his eyes became so tired he switched off the lamp and simply sat in darkness, listening to the drone of planes. Somewhere close at hand an owl screeched.

Disturbed by the sight of Kenny loitering at the end of the drive, he’d started to remember going to the asylum to see his own mother, and how, by the end of four years, he’d known every stop on the journey, which always ended with him walking up a long gray corridor towards his mother, who stood waiting at the end. A fat woman in a hideous gray smock. He almost didn’t recognize her, she’d put on so much weight. This strange woman, who felt different, looked different, even smelled different, who was always touching him, stroking his hair, fondling him…Now, when he didn’t need it, when he was merely embarrassed by it. For the most part, he just stood there, putting up with it, but once, and he was almost sure it was the last visit, he just couldn’t bear it any more and pushed her away. Really quite hard; she stumbled and might have fallen if his father hadn’t caught her.

Had that rejection led directly to her suicide? It had happened not long afterwards. Did it seem to her that since her only child had turned against her there was nothing left worth living for?

No point in asking questions like that. He would never know the truth, and besides, he had, somehow or other, to forgive himself. After all, he’d been fourteen years old; not a child, admittedly, but certainly not a man. You have to learn not to be too hard on your own younger self. Most of the time he dealt with it by forgetting it. Only Kenny, his obvious misery, his separation from his mother, threatened to disinter these long-buried memories. But there was no point. Absolutely no point at all. Getting up, he poured himself a generous glass of whisky, selected a book at random from the shelves and threw himself onto the sofa to begin reading. He’d go back to the drawings later.

—

THAT NIGHT, the old woman sank into unconsciousness. There was no question, now, of taking turns in the sickroom; the sisters sat on either side of the bed, each of them holding one of their mother’s hands, Rachel, pink and blurry with tears, Elinor, hard and white, defiantly unfeeling. The long hours passed. Mother gave no sign of knowing them. Once Elinor gripped her hand and said: “Squeeze if you’re in pain.” A slight, but unmistakable, pressure in return. So the doctor came to give morphine. And the wait went on. It was like watching a great liner begin to go down, lighted windows darkening one after another. Her breathing had changed; and then, in the last few minutes — only they didn’t know they were the last — she started to vomit. They stared at the stains on the sheets. Elinor thought: That’s not vomit; it’s shit. A few minutes later, the death throes started. All her life, Elinor had believed death throes were some kind of poetic invention. Evidently not. The sisters held on to her, talking, trying to think of soothing things to say, until eventually she went slack.

“Is that it?” Rachel was still waiting for the next breath, but the old woman’s chest didn’t move. They looked at each other; the silence went on…“I think she’s gone.”

Rachel went to get Nurse Wiggins, who confirmed what by now they were both beginning to believe. In her deep, inviolable silence, their mother was still the dominant figure in the room. But then, Nurse Wiggins pushed the drooping head back — it had fallen forward so her chin was resting on her chest — and so her mouth fell open. Suddenly, she looked dead. Nurse Wiggins said she’d have to fasten up the jaw. And then there were sheets to be changed, the body to be washed…

The sisters sat together on the bed in Rachel’s room while the nurse finished the laying-out. Rachel was twisting a handkerchief round and round in her fingers. “Why is it such a shock? It’s not as if we weren’t expecting it.”

“Look, why don’t you go back to bed and try to get some sleep? It’s not as if you can do anything.”

Before parting, they went back to their mother’s room. She lay there, gray and remote, penny weights on her eyelids, her jaw bound up with a white cloth. Nurse Wiggins had put a posy of flowers between the clasped, brown-spotted hands. Immediately, Elinor wanted to snatch them away, it seemed so false somehow, but then Mother had always loved flowers. Rachel touched the cooling face and whispered, “Good-bye, Mum.” Crying, she turned away.

Elinor went to her own room, also grieving, not for what she’d lost, but for what she’d never had, and never could have now. As she climbed into bed, Paul half woke and reached out to her, so she cried in his arms and let him soothe her to sleep.

When, a few hours later, she woke she heard her mother’s voice say, as loud and clear as if she’d been in the same room: I knew. And from that moment, Elinor ceased to feel anything Rachel, or anybody else for that matter, would have recognized as grief.

The next day she hardly thought at all; she made telephone calls, sent telegrams, worked her way through her mother’s address book, coming across the names of relatives and friends dimly remembered from childhood, but often finding, when she set out to contact them, that they’d died years ago. Her mother’s eldest sister was so frail she might not be able to make it to the funeral, but her two younger sisters certainly would, along with various other relatives, nieces, nephews and cousins, and then of course there were the grandchildren. Gabriella, though heavily pregnant, had decided she would come. Rachel wanted to keep Mother at home till the funeral — it was the family tradition — but Tim, who’d arrived from London in the early afternoon, said: “No, not in this heat”—and the undertaker backed him up. So the sisters held on to each other in the drawing room, while the undertaker’s men sweated and strained to negotiate the stairs.

A great deal had been achieved in a short time, only now there was emptiness. Mrs. Murchison was busy in the kitchen, preparing, for the first time in over a week, a proper sit-down dinner. She’d managed to get river trout for the main course, with potatoes and other vegetables from the garden, and she’d made an apple pie. “I don’t know who she thinks is going to eat that,” Elinor said, though Paul thought he might. And no doubt Kenny as well, if he chose to appear. He was being elusive, even by his own impressive standards. The last few days he’d simply raided the kitchen whenever Mrs. Murchison’s back was turned and eaten whatever scraps of food he managed to find behind the garden shed or out on the marshes. He was becoming almost feral and nobody seemed to give a damn about it except Paul.

When dinner time came, Kenny was, predictably, missing.

“Paul, do you think you could find him?” Rachel asked.

“I thought I heard him come in just now.”

“Well, he’s not here.”

Paul went first into the garden and looked up at the sycamore tree. Alex had used this tree as a refuge when he was a boy: the “safety tree” he used to call it. It interested Paul that Alex, with his privileged background, had felt the same need for a refuge from the adult world as Kenny did, who was so much more obviously disadvantaged. Oh, Paul didn’t underestimate the psychological pressures on Alex. Nobody could grow up in Toby Brooke’s shadow and not be distorted in some way; deformed, even. Paul’s view of Alex was a good deal less favorable than either Rachel’s or Elinor’s.

“Kenny? Kenny? Dinnertime.”

It was growing dark; he’d almost certainly have come in by now. So Paul trailed to the top of the house, knocked on the nursery door and went in. Kenny was kneeling on the floor beside his bed, playing with toy soldiers. He’d laid them out, hundreds of them, khaki and gray, facing each other across no-man’s-land: an appropriately mud-colored stretch of lino. The soldiers had belonged to Alex. As a child, he’d been obsessed with fighting the last war, convinced he could do a better job than the generals. And who am I to argue? Paul thought, persuading his stiff leg to bend. But really there was no time to get involved in this particular game. “Dinnertime, Kenny.”

He didn’t even look up. “Too hot.”

“Apple pie? Custard?”

No answer. Paul picked up two of the little soldiers and laid them on the palm of his hand. Officers, wearing the dated uniform of the last war: tunics, peaked caps, breeches, puttees. He remembered the advice supposedly given to German snipers: Look for the thin knees. Take out the chain of command. They’d changed the uniform later, made it slightly more difficult to pick out the officers. He felt a sudden impulse to talk to somebody who’d been there; no, not even talk — just be with him. Share what there was to share, in silence. Nobody here he could do that with: certainly not Tim, who’d spent the last war behind a desk in Whitehall.

His silence caught the boy’s attention. Kenny was adept at screening out nagging and shouting: he simply didn’t hear it. Any more than he heard his own name being called. Attention means trouble, and trouble comes fast enough. But now, looking across the battlefield, Paul found those curious, copper-colored eyes fixed on him. Purple shadows underneath. He looked tired; tired of life. No child should look like that.

“Who’s winning?” Paul asked, searching for a point of contact.

“Us.”

“That’s good.”

“You won’t tell them, will you?”

“Tell them what?”

“That I got the soldiers.”

Paul was shocked. “Nobody minds, Kenny. You play with anything you like. It must be really boring, with nobody to play with. At least at school—”

“School’s boring. I hate it.”

“What about it? What don’t you like?”

“The way they pick on us.”

“The other boys?”

“Yeah — and the teachers.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Dunno. I don’t talk like them? And…” A sudden, painful, disfiguring blush. “Me hair.”

“But it’s all grown back.”

“Doesn’t stop ’em shouting, ‘Baldy, don’t sit by him, he’s got nits.’ ”

“You haven’t got nits.”

“Doesn’t stop ’em saying it.”

“Perhaps if Auntie Rachel went down—”

“You joking? I’d really get me head kicked in then.”

As he spoke he was scooping up handfuls of tiny khaki soldiers and dropping them into a wooden box. Heavy losses for one small square of lino. Perhaps they’d been defending a salient. Paul turned the two little figures over and over in the palm of his hand. Suddenly, he glanced up and saw the boy watching him.

“Were you in it?”

“The war?” Paul looked down at the battlefield. “Yes.”

“Were you wounded?”

“Ye-es.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Knee. Since you ask.”

“Thought so, you got a limp, haven’t you?” He hesitated, but only for a second. “Can I see?”

“There’s nothing to see. And no, you can’t.”

“What was it like? Being wounded.”

“Not very nice. Why do you want to know about that?”

“Just interested.”

“But why are you?”

“I like hearing about people getting hurt.”

Oh, do you indeed? “I was unconscious most of the time.”

“Did you win a medal?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I was never very brave.”

The boy looked at him. “Bet you were.”

“Bet I wasn’t.”

Kenny considered this, then unexpectedly laughed. “I’m going to be a soldier when I grow up.”

“Well, if it goes on long enough you mightn’t have much choice.”

“Nah, won’t last that long.”

“We said that last time. Oh, unless we get invaded…Be over in no time then.”

“Cheerful sod, aren’t you?” Another handful went into the box. “Some people think we already have been.” He glanced cautiously from side to side and whispered: “Nuns.”

Oh, yes. Nuns on buses paying the fare with surprisingly masculine hands. “I shouldn’t worry about that, Kenny. It’s just a story. Newspapers’ll print anything.”

“You could kill one of them if you had a pitchfork.”

“I suppose you could, though you’d need to make sure it wasn’t a real nun first.”

“S’easy, you just put your hand up his skirt and see if he’s got a willy.”

Mental note: Keep Kenny away from nuns. Suddenly tired of the whole business, Paul heaved himself to his feet. His stiff knee meant he had to get up like a toddler, pushing himself up with his hands, and he didn’t like to be watched doing it. Looking down, he saw a neat parting in the orange hair revealing the dead white of the scalp, and felt a stab of pain, for the boy, for himself, for the whole bloody stupid business. “Come on, now. Dinnertime.”

“I’ve got to wash me hands.” He held them up as proof.

“All right, but hurry up.”

Paul went slowly downstairs. Crossing the hall, he stopped in front of Toby Brooke’s portrait. Nigel Featherstone, no less. Now why on earth was he so successful? He’d never done anything that wasn’t completely bland. Perhaps that was why. Who wants disturbing truths in the portrait of a loved one? Elinor’s portrait of Toby, though not, in her own view, a complete success, was better than this. It caught something of the reality, the power, of that slim, voracious ghost.

Paul became aware of Kenny standing by his side. “Now he was brave.” Toby, he knew from several accounts, had been a whole lot of things, but brave was certainly one. “See that?” Paul pointed to the canvas. “That’s the MC, the Military Cross.” He looked down at Kenny, who was staring intently at the medal. “Come on, they’re all in there waiting. You must be hungry; I know I am.”

Putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder, he steered him towards the dining room.